How To: Make Your Old Blog Posts ROCK in the Search Results

Blogs posts have dates on them. They’re typically just like a news article that’s posted on a local news website. After a period of time, your blog posts become “old news”. Therefore, the search engines (mainly Google) won’t rank your old blog post as well as it previously did, even though you did everything you can: such as verify Google Authorship, get is socialized, and even get lots of links to it.

Old blog posts just don’t have the same “oomph” as they did when you first posted that blog post.

Did you know that it’s possible to revive your old blog posts and make them ROCK (rank much better than they did before) in the search results? Here is a little-known trick that I have been using for a while now. Some wouldn’t necessarily call this a trick per se, but it’s an interesting use of “the system” that Google has set up. The way the Google algorithm deals with blog posts.

So, here is how to revive an old blog post in the search results so that it ranks better than it ever did:

1. First, find the old blog post and edit it. I use WordPress, so after logging in and going to the post, I can simply click “edit” to edit the post.

2. Copy the title and the full text from the blog post. If there were embedded images, that’s fine, keep those. You should be editing the blog post using the “text” or “html” option in the WordPress Dashboard. Copy it all.

3. Paste the code from the blog post (all of the text), including the title, into Notepad or another text editor.

4. Go into WordPress and start a new page. Not a new post, but a new page.

5. Copy the title and the whole entire old blog post into a new page on your site.

6. Publish the page.

7. View the page to make sure that everything copied over just fine.

8. Copy the URL of the new page.

9. Go back and edit your original blog post. Add the following meta tag into the post:

Where “new-blog-page” is the URL of your new blog page that you just created. You can learn more about the canonical tag here or here.

10. Save the blog post.

11. Socialize the blog page, you will want to tweet it, share it on at least a few social sites in order to get it crawled and indexed.

Once you’ve done this, and added the “rel canonical” canonical tag onto the old blog post, you’re essentially passing on all of the “SEO value” over to the new blog page. Google likes blog pages more than they do blog posts (since it’s an old blog post that may not be as timely as it used to be).

The great part of this is that the blog post is still live–so it will still get traffic. But, what will happen is that the new blog page will end up ranking much better than the old blog post ever did.